Partnerships + Collaborations

Living Pictures

07/21/2011

The New York Times calls Small’s experimental and very human performance art piece ”a gift.”

Imagine
a 15th-century Hieronymus Bosch painting, with its boisterous tangle
of humanity, coming alive as an experimental “living picture.” That’s just part of
what Sarah
Small 01 PH has been aiming for through a series of ever-more ambitious
performance art pieces that culminated in her most successful to
date:Tableau Vivant of the Delirium
Constructions. Billed as a “live exploration of implausible
interaction,” the piece presents a microcosm of humanity performed by
120 cast members of all ages, stages, genders, colors, sizes, shapes and
temperaments.

The idea for the piece stems from a visit to
the Louvre two years ago, when Small was struck by the diversity of emotions, gestures
and facial expressions frozen in the frames of masterpieces hanging on the walls. What would it be like, she imagined, if the subjects stepped out of
their frames and began mixing and mingling with each other?

Small had already begun experimenting with staged visual tableaux through a
still photography project called The Delirium Constructions. “I want to photograph the raw emotional
underbelly of scenes I find and scenes I fabricate,” she explains in a video about her work. But the idea of bringing a scene in a painting to life – animating a world captured on canvas – also intrigued her, as
did the notion of adding dimension through musical
dissonance and harmony. So Small writes vocal arrangements of Bulgarian folksongs through her a cappella quartet Black Sea Hotel and integrates them into the piece, along with operatic singing and choral chanting. She has also added a pinch of ritual and reality for good
measure, staging a real life marriage at each performance. All in all, the piece is both a radical experiment and an homage to the history of art – a
joyous (and at times humorous) visual encyclopedia of the human condition.

Rave reviewsSo far Delirium has
attracted a lot of buzz among audiences and critics who were privy to the
Brooklyn debut in May. “As with looking at a painting by Bosch, the more you
gaze at the panoply of human figures that Ms. Small arrays with a painterly eye
over the stage space, the more you see,” noted Roslyn Sulcas in The
New York Times. “By the end, the ordinary – the imperfect, real human
bodies in their astounding variety of shapes, colors and forms – seems like a
miracle, and Delirium like a gift.”

A similarly enthusiastic review in The Washington Post points out that “what is most interesting is that for all its grandeur, [Delirium] is not an ego trip. Most performance art relies heavily on its
creator’s personal magnetism... Yet Small barely figures in her tableau. She will appear among
the models at certain points during the hour-long performance,
conducting their movements as if they were a giant vertical orchestra.
But the audience will barely see her; she will disappear among her
masses, and that’s the point. Small’s tableau turns art-world egomania
and our present-day fixation with ourselves on its head. She has created
a major opus that is surprisingly self-effacing.”

Small,
whose photography
and other artworks have appeared in Vogue,
LIFE, Rolling Stone, Zoom
International and The New York Times, is now collaborating on a documentary
about the Delirium project while
preparing for an international tour of the live performance in 2013. Called The Delirium Constructions, the feature
film deconstructs the interactive creative process of making the piece over the
course of two years – from the original inspiration to casting, rehearsing and
performing the piece live.

Following the release of the film, Small and her collaborators will stage the
piece in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Sydney and Tel Aviv, among other cities. Each performance will be documented on film and will include a legal wedding as part of the unique blend of ritual and reality that characterizes each delirious celebration.

Named one of the top 13 emerging photographers
by American Photo Magazine, Small continues to exhibit her two-dimensional work
widely and has been recognized with a number of awards. Her photography has been shown
in galleries throughout the U.S. and in Australia, China, France, Germany, Great
Britain, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Madrid, the Netherlands and Taiwan.